Case Study: How Air France Boosts Performance with Customer Journeys

Founded in 1933, Air France is the number one French airline and, together with KLM, one of the world's largest air carriers, flying to over 300 destinations and transporting over 100 million passengers.

Air France's digital e-commerce team is driven by the ambition to provide the best possible service to their customers and prospects. This means that they need to know what their passengers expect from them at any moment and be able to provide them with the right service.

In 2016, Air France onboarded the Relay42 platform and started its journey to building a 360-degree view of the customer. By better understanding their customers, the team aimed to personalize their offerings and services to suit the needs of each individual customer.

IDENTIFYING THE AUDIENCE

To get started, the team began capturing all flight searches that occurred place on the Air France website. A customer journey would be activated when a website visitor searched for a flight but didn't book.

With the help of Relay42 identity management, the team could already recognize whether a search was being made by a prospect or an existing customer. From there, customers were placed into one of two audiences, based on whether they had a travel voucher for a destination that had been canceled due to the pandemic.

CONNECTED CHANNELS

The team chose to orchestrate this journey across three channels: push messaging, display and social media.

HIGHLY PERSONALIZED MESSAGING

The e-acquisition team tailored the messaging on all channels for each of the three target groups, based on the last flight search of every visitor and whether they had a flying voucher.

Here's what an orchestrated customer journey looks like:

Results and Next Steps

The marketing team created an A/B test so they could optimize the performance of the customer journey. The test compared the old way of single-channel retargeting vs the new orchestrated journey with sequenced, timely activated channels.

After the first testing period, the marketing team measured a significant performance increase: the new journey increased conversions by 25.7%. The team learned that channel sequencing works: start with push messaging, then follow up with display and/or social to encourage conversion.

The time-based rules also showed a positive effect, as customers were not overly exposed to advertising.

After the successful experiment with Relay42’s journey orchestration module, the marketing team will be focusing on fine-tuning the customer journey and implementing the journey on a larger scale.